Page 103 of Of Sockets Of Stitches
How deflating after a sudden and sharp hope.
The countess screamed, “Plug me!”
I calmly said to mothers, “We enter vigil together.”
What I really meant was “We enter vigil together for the last time.”
No sooner had the words passed my lips than my body was locked in the immobility of horror. A horror of mind, for that was the feeling of knowing too much while alive. Too much of the undead. Too much of what lay beyond the toothed beast’s yawn.
Screams and cries and moans rang around me, for my monsters had never experienced vigil. In my last vigil, where lightning pinned me to the ground, I had been rendered to a childlike state beforehand that made this experience easier.
I wagered that mothers no longer had the strength and numbers to do so.
My body began to sway, and then to circle. The circles started small and smooth, and over minutes or hours, the circles grew in size and in jerkiness.
Words of the undead poured from my uneven lips, and I let them slip away into the grayscale world without making the mistake of memorizing them. I was not meant to speak this language beyond this vigil.
I was not meant to understand.
A moan rose above the undead chant of mothers, a deep groan that did not stop when the body should have demanded its maker take a breath. The never ending groan arose from Earl Bring.
A whispered scream rose to sit atop his groan. Her scream was just as endless and without need of breath.
The whispered scream and groan swelled until they were a bellow and a terrified shrieking wail.Unending.Locked in horror. Through vigil, we forced resilience into the Brings’ union. We shattered them with every imaginable fear and doubt and loneliness that a couple might ever endure. We splintered their beings with centuries of trial and tested loyalty. The Brings’ new union had been untested, and so now they screamed and bellowed their pain through millennia of agony and uncertainty that would tear at their very souls.
And all to gift them with surety of their love, earned and upheld and supported.
Tested. And triumphed in.
Power whipped at dirt, spraying and pelting monsters with its grains. Tears trekked over my cheeks as the Brings’ bellow and shriek lightened back to a groan and whispered scream.
I could feel that mothers were still unleashing agony and pain upon the Brings, but they no longer made a sound.
Resilience.
A smile trembled on my lips.
The circling of my body was arrested.
An eerie silence hovered in the air like smoke, but for the slow and damp lovemaking of the Brings. So slow and with no frenzy, only an eagerness to draw out the connection a while longer—to remain always in one another’s embrace. Such surety and history between them.
They were truly making love.
All monsters and mothers listened to her small cry of satisfaction, and his hushed reassurances after. His sweet words.
And when my body was unlocked from vigil, I remained in place and only opened my eyes to stare up at the gray sky of this world.
“Thank you, Mothers,” I whispered. “That was a great gift indeed.”
Enough, perhaps, to save the world. Though as Cassandra had so clearly warned, the vigil only might have readied the Brings. The vigil onlymighthave been enough.
Might.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Hope is a creature of horror.
Hope was a terrible force, more haunting than the most haunting haunt of a monster.
